that tone-deaf, obliviously old-fashioned organizations will make heinous blunders in social media, and that they will be caught out, brutally

Well, there you go.

Yes, not only did they steal her post, but when she brought it to their attention that the post had been stolen, they tried to hide the fact by deleting her name but keeping the post.

Judge for yourself. Here’s the original article, written for TourismVancouver, and here is the stolen article, which was used without notice, permission or payment. According to Rebecca, Tourism Vancouver is aware of this as an ongoing issue with the NBC Olympic site, and has been battling them for some time over it.

You can see what (predictably) happened to the dialogue on Twitter, an even 70 mentions since she first put the word out.

Terms used to describe NBC, as you can see, varied from “not kosher” to “wankers” and worse. Just to do my part, I posted it to Facebook, retweeted it a couple of times, blogged it here, and (probably most importantly) submitted it to the tipline at Gawker, which is read by pretty much everyone who matters in the world of news and is famously hungry for tales of old media doing stupid, nasty things to new media, which sums up this situation perfectly. Then I went to the NBC Olympic site and informed them of it, using their comment form. If I’d been able to find their host, I’d have reported them for blog scraping, which typically results in a guilty blog going down within 24 hours in my experience. If ONLY they’d been hosted by WordPress.com under their VIP program, like CNN, I could have had some real fun with that; I may not have many strings to pull, but the ones I have are good ones.

Now that we’ve shit disturbed for the Greater Good, it’s time to hit the hay and give NBC some time to react. Tomorrow should be interesting, particularly for the PR department of NBC.

Thanks for bringing attention to this, Lorraine. Feeling slightly betrayed (and my contract is violated). I have asked that the article be completely removed if they refuse to put the credit on there. We’ll see how that goes.

I saw the post and while I love that this is getting wider exposure, I have to say that particular comment doesn’t really clarify anything except that Tourism Vancouver is anal-retentive. It doesn’t give copyright away.

If rights are not specifically given, then they have not been granted, it’s as simple as that.

Oh, my mistake – I guess people have assumed the following quoted text isn’t settled in a legal sense. Over-broad “terms of use” and anything “Olympics” doesn’t help matters! Not to mention, this is an “International Incident” now :)

“which was used without notice, permission or payment. According to Rebecca, Tourism Vancouver is aware of this as an ongoing issue with the NBC Olympic site, and has been battling them for some time over it.”

They didn’t pay me, Tourism Vancouver did initially as they commissioned me to write the article. I have been very happy with the exposure and the contract and I’m not sure anyone anticipated this.

However, when the article was bundled up and “given” to NBC I would have really liked a) a head’s up b) appropriate credit as stated in my contract as “Rebecca Bollwitt of Miss604.com”. I have spoken to Tourism BC and Tourism Vancouver about this.

All parties have listened and have restored my name…

I think we’ll be seeing many more things like this in the coming months.

So the bottom line is: you had an exclusive contract with Tourism Vancouver, which denied BOTH parties the right to repost the material elsewhere. You were paid for your contribution.

Tourism Vancouver then gave that material to NBCOlympics without your knowledge or consent, and in apparent breach of the contract.

When NBC was contacted by you, they removed your name, which looks very much like admission of guilt.

When this hit the fan on this site and Techdirt, the blowback was such that Tourism Vancouver stepped up to “clarify the situation” which they had not done before, and your name was appended to the article on the NBCOlympic site, in small font and unlinked.

[…] Naturally, as copyright owner you are entitled to sell various subsidiary or even All Rights to your work as you please. Sadly, that doesn’t always mean you can relax, as Vancouver blogger Rebecca Bollwitt, known as Miss604, found out. […]

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